Greedy Goblin

Monday, March 1, 2010

Concerning dragons

Saturday, as usual, after some waiting, exactly 10 raiders were online. We thought that we will progress gradually. After all, it's hard mode content, intended for people who farmed Naxx and Sarth+0. So we did Sarth+1. 2 shotted it.

Then we went to Malygos. 1 shotted him.

Since we still had time, started seeking some more dragons, and heard that one, by the name Razorscale, set up her residence in Ulduar. For little complication, the other mage had to leave, so I had to be frost again, and I was the only ranged.

After 1-shotting FL (8 wipes once upon a time), we 2 shotted the last dragon of the day, also the guy who proves that smoking a pot and being raidboss is a bad idea, and finally the most annoying boss ever. The wipes were because of (admittedly) doing it first time in the current role for many people. And they also demanded screenshot. From XT. Weird.

Logs here. Too bad that the old logs already expired, but I have a screenshot of it in an old post. The raid DPS was 20700 on XT, now we had 22800 in a highly sub-optimal group (3 DK, 2 warr, 2 sham, 1 priest, 1 druid, 1 mage, 2 of us on offspec). The old group was of a hard mode raiding guild, who just picked some random ilvl170-190 blues, and with their normal spec and rotation came to raid. The current group geared and specced for this purpose.

How about you? Unless you are in the top 5% hard mode guilds, what are you doing? Helping "yet undergeared" people getting ready for something (striking e-peen in Dalaran)? I hope soon everyone will see that there is no such thing as "undergeared", just "firedancing, drooling retard", and stop helping them. If you are already fed up with them, but don't have time to raid in HC guilds, join. We'd like to raid in 25 man too, and it's pretty hard if only 10 are online. There are no attendance requirements, you can come for part of the raid and you can raid on any spec you like (as long as you do it right).

Next week we will finish this Ulduar. I think we'll skip Mimiron. But of course not the way the "yet undergeared" people used to do (before they abandoned Ulduar for the ToC loot shower)

In PvE you fight against [b]static[/b] difficulty [b]scripted[/b] npc bosses.

While in PvP your opponents are [b]dynamic[/b] skill and has [b]human intellect[/b].

A Grandmaster of chess probably can win most of chess beginners even when starting with 2-3 pieces less.

But once the players are of pretty much equal skill, the ones with worse gear get pretty much get obliterated.

The whole point of the Undergeared project is to prove that PvE content is a joke, not the obvious fact that low level Arenas and average BG pugs are swarming with retards.

I believe that a organized full blue premade could sometimes win an average pug and also maybe a full blue arena team could get somewhere like 1.3-1.5k rating. But high rated arena is a no-no, since it is filled with players that are close to BiS whatever season PvP gear gearead AND very skilled. You can't get there, if you are have like ~2x (just compare 78set stats with Relentless/Wrathful) worse gear, but just the same skill level.

But that still would not prove anything, since the enemy pool is dynamic, dependant on Battle Group, play times etc., while PvE enemies are the same on every server 24x7.

In terms of game theory, if we have a game with some rules, where one side has a major material advantage, there comes a point, where this sides any random move sequence wins any others sides random move sequence.

That means that no matter how good you play according to the games rules, your 'overgeared' opponents any counter move is still better.

In WoW PvP in the case of huge gear advantage the overgeared team can just /faceroll and still win no matter how well you play, since their affordable error margin is nearly 100%.

I think you're making the wrong point. The point is not people being undergeared. The point is that other people are overgeared. I've seen people with a 5k gs farming heroics. Any retard without brains just takes it that they need 5k gs to do more dps too.

They forget that you don't need 5k gearscore for an heroic. Because a lot of people have 5k gs.

They see good gear = good dps, bad gear = bad dps. They don't see talent trees. They don't see rotation. They don't notice how the guy with 5k gs manages to get out of the fire everytime. For them, the only visible difference is the gear. And that's why the undergeared myth exists.While it's actually other people being overgeared. But hey, they are socials, and what can you expect from socials? They'll try to be just like the guys around them.

To give a funny answer. Just before the launch of ICC I joined a 'strict' 10-man guild. This meaning that people can only do 10-man (no 25-man) and thus 25-man gear is 'forbidden'. The reason for the 'strict' is to play the content the way it is foreseen, so without 'outgearing' it by a tier (which is the difference between 10 and 25 man). To give an idea: so far we are at Sindragosa ph3. (avg raid time in ICC so far is 2 evenings for 3 hours/week since release of ICC)

Your project is pretty much in the same line, but a major step further. Doing it 4 tiers lower: "in blues". I'm eagered to see your further progress, but I'm afraid that the 'gearcheck' will be a bit to harsh in ICC. (Perhaps one day you'll have switch to ilvl200 epics instead of blues to progress further.) Anyway, "thumbs up".

@Gevlon - blog posts with graphics > blog posts without graphics. So what if it's only XT. ;)

@Dan - that shaman would be me, so yeah, my fault as I totally forgot, won't happen again.

Switching to a new class comes with things like that - shamans have the weapon buffs, shields and totems, and I just have to remember about them, just like I have to remember about putting Vigilance on someone when playing on my warrior.

I'm fixing it right now in the same way as I did Vigilance - a blinking icon in Power Auras if I don't have one.

The classes have all received significant dps buffs in the form of ability and talent redesign, which would explain the increase in DPS you see.

Also, relatively impressive. However, this sounds like an experiment best done on a private server. You are running an experiment with no control. You have no way of knowing when you do run into a failure wall (which you will do as dps requirements increase) what is causing the failure, and by what margin. You need a method of increasing the gear of the raid by 1 tier at a time until a gearcheck challenge becomes surmountable, and how many tiers below it becomes possible.

You also have no way of determining when you fail if it was a gear-check or a skill check. Some gear checks will be tricky to spot and may appear to the untrained eye to be a skill-failure, but in reality you just do not have the mathematical burst to accomplish the objective (burning adds on Jarraxus or thorim's hallway).

My point is that you cannot create ANY inarguable conclusions based on a study with a sample of 1 team and no control.

You are arguing the wrong way around. It's not to prove what the minimum gear is that you need to clear certain content, it's to show how much you can clear with gear that requires minimum effort. As such, you can consider everyone at 80 to have that gear at least, and anyone saying "they just need to gear up" is lying through their nose or so.

The point is not to be some scientific study. Doing something like this on a private server would defeat the purpose of showing you can do this on the live servers, since everyone would say you hacked it. Getting additional tiers of gear, trust me, won't be much of a problem, we're all swimming in triumph badges, and many of us have the ilvl200 epics in bank from all the heroics we ran.

My point is that you cannot create ANY inarguable conclusions based on a study with a sample of 1 team and no control.

A boss-kill is inarguable.

Gevlon already killed Yogg with another blue man group, he'll succeed again. As for gear checks... from my own raiding experience what looks like a block in the first attempts often becomes much easier after refining strategeries / movement / communication etc.

In our first pulls Deathwisper25 we didn't even get her manashield down before the enrage, two hours later she was dead.

A real gear-block is when the tank has not enough armor/life so the boss hits him for more resulting in a one-shot. Combat logs from Gormok on blue tanks will be interesting :) but even there a solution might be found by stacking paladins to remove the bleeding. I'm pretty sure my own raid would horribly die in blue gear due to the black/white balls at Twin Valk encounter (we're not hardmode capable) but Gevlons platoon will move out of the way.

It's hard to predict which will be the first encounter that a blue geared group isn't able to do at all. I'd wager they will clear ToC10 and Marrowgar10 but can't push the necessary damage at Deathwisper.

"You are arguing the wrong way around. It's not to prove what the minimum gear is that you need to clear certain content, it's to show how much you can clear with gear that requires minimum effort."

I'm not the only one who noticed, but it's actually proving to be significantly more effort to min-max blue gear on my paladin than it was to get my mage and druid to a slightly higher gear level back in 3.0, when farming heroics and gold could provide ilvl 200 epic gear along with blue. On the day they hit 80, they were already geared a bit better than the undergeared folks who've been farming for a while.

Compared to gearing *now*? Between crafted, triumph, toc, icc5normal gear, I could probably be pushing 5k gear score within a week or two of hitting 80 without doing a single raid. Meanwhile, it will probably be well over a month before I get all BiS blues.

It will be interesting to see how the tougher bosses are handled. Gormok for instance will hit like festergut + 3 stacks over the course of the entire fight, and when the tank gets killed in a 1-gcd window of time it'll be very hard.I'm thinking you'll have to set up a cooldown rotation to survive it- stack disc/holy priests and holy pallys as your healers, and a tank class with good cooldowns (dk maybe) and you can chain Vblood > guardian spirit > hand > pain suppression > icebound fortitude etc throughout the fight. It'd be hard to pull off, but it might be the only way to survive.